Thoughts from London

Milking the people to fatten multinationals
Last Sunday this newspaper carried a letter from a protesting resident of Dehiwela despairing at the rising prices of utilities. His immediate anger was directed at the National Water and Drainage Board for jacking up the rates for water that has seen his own bills spiral by some 200 per cent.

Having vented his anger on the "Rata Perata" programme of the present government reader O. Gooneratne hoped that his letter would catch the eye of the relevant minister.

I don't know who that minister is, but if reader Gooneratne hopes to catch the minister's eye he is living in a Dickensian world of great expectations. Even if the minister is in the country and not trying to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days or less, at public expense naturally, the chances of attracting ministerial attention seem extremely remote, seeing that there are more interesting subjects that catch their eye, if the past be any guide.

I don't know what odds Sumathipala would offer on reader Gooneratne fulfilling his hopes but if I were a betting man I would not touch it with a barge pole, as they say. Now that we are on the subject of ministerial travel perhaps a diversion might be permitted.

This is merely a suggestion of course. Would the Sri Lanka Institute of Marketing that goes by the abbreviation SLIM which recently awarded President Kumaratunga a national icon for bringing a multiplicity Sri Lankan values into her political life, consider adding a little more fat to its ceremony by awarding another icon to its honours list next time round.

Why not give one to the minister who spends the most number of days abroad. Right now it would be a great race between Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar and Tourism Minister Anura Bandaranaike.

If such an award were announced surely there would be other contenders for this icon status. And it would be so simple too. Without engaging in an island-wide survey (which incidentally was not island-wide) to pick the winner, all SLIM or the pollsters need to peruse are ministerial passports and air tickets- with top marks for first class travel and less for business class.

We might be a developing country living on money borrowed from those terrible twins in Washington, the IMF and World Bank. But no minister should be seen dead in economy class even if he has had a hand in ruining the economy.

Even if SLIM is hesitant to do so there would be other organisations prepared to pick up the slack. Who knows, even in these dark days when commodity prices rise more rapidly than SriLankan Airlines bearing ministerial messiahs on their onerous peregrinations, there may be civic-minded people who would readily give a day's wages to buy them one-way tickets to wherever.

But all this in the way of an aside in the hope that it will gladden reader Gooneratne's heart even if his epistle failed to catch the ministerial eye. Personally, I would like to see the National Water Supply and Drainage Board split into two so that we could have one minister for water supply and another for drainage.

This, I venture to add, is a more realistic approach. For one, there are still some government MPs who have not been elevated to ministerial benches. Also it would be easier to inveigle opposition MPs if there are portfolios available without trying to snatch departments and corporations from another minister and antagonise the poor chap no end.

With fewer departments and corporations under one's purview, the chances of planting stooges and henchmen in them at public expense are vastly reduced.

The one disadvantage is that the cabinet benches could overflow like the clogged drains in Colombo. But then any efficient minister should be able to clear the drains during his stewardship.

If I were President Kumaratunga, which, thanks to the many deities, I am not, I would divide the future ministry of drainage too. One could easily create a minister for flushing and another for major drains. This might be a drain on our resources but who cares as long as we privatise even the flush toilets to please the IMF and the World Bank.

Naturally these ministers would have to work in very close co-operation with the minister for water supply. How on earth could you flush and cleanse the drains without water.

This would naturally call for considerable political acumen. It would be silly to give the water supply portfolio to the JVP and the other two to the SLFP. Come to think of it the CWC might do a better job in the drainage portfolio than the SLFP. But that's only a thought

Anyway the danger is quite evident. If the JVP wishes to pull the plug on the president and shut off the taps, it would make the other two ministers collectively the number one smell in the civic nostril.

I am not quite certain the care of the city sewers is a function of the Drainage Board. It is a toss up with the municipality. Even if it is not, it might be useful to have at least a deputy minister for sewers seeing that the doings of politicians — like offering contracts with calling for tenders — tend to raise such a public stink.

All the same, reader Gooneratne's grouse against the Water Supply and Drainage Board is misplaced. The fault lies, to adapt the words of Cassius, not in the Board but in those governments that have capitulated to the World Bank and IMF.

We have agreed to privatise several public utilities and state institutions allowing exploitative multinationals to feed themselves on the many pounds of flesh that have been or will be thrown at them in the coming years if not months.

For a decade or two privatisation of water supply in developing countries has been a high priority in World Bank programmes of so-called poverty reduction.

What is not widely realised is that water is really big business. It is estimated by some experts that the entire water sector including wastewater treatment amounts to some 200 billion dollars. As the demand for water increases from around 1.2 billion users today to 3 billion or more in the next 20 years, the western-controlled water industry will be reaping the benefits, actively aided by the World Bank and the IMF.

Returning from the Kandy Donor Conference Praful Patel, the World Bank's Vice President for South Asia told us in London last week how the WB has learnt lessons from the past and is adopting new strategies for poverty reduction and reconstruction.

Hardly had he left here when the British media reported that another World Bank funded water privatisation scheme, considered a flagship project, had collapsed, this time in Tanzania. One of the most ambitious projects in Africa it was to be a model.

An international development group ActionAid blasted both the World Bank and British Government that funded it. Instead of being a model for the rejuvenation of poor countries the project was a model for disaster like so many other WB sponsored water privatisation schemes that deprived the poor of water and fattened western water companies.

If anybody should be blamed it must be the Washington twins and the politicians who easily succumb to them.

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